Countries as Characters?

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In Steve's "What do you want to see?" thread in the Fantasy HERO forum, a poster suggested building countries using HERO stats just like we build everything else in HERO. I thought this was an interesting idea, and I'll probably use it in the future.

Looking at current events, this begs the question of what stats to give the major players in the present world scene. Any suggestions? (And don't everybody do France. )

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It's a very interesting idea -- it's something I've toyed around with for years. I'm vaguely tempted to work on it further for FH, but I expect it will take more time to get right than I can afford to devote to it. It'll probably have to wait until some future point when I have more time to spend on such things. Or maybe, if I stretch the concept of "Base" a little, it would be suitable for The Ultimate Base.

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This is somewhat like a sci-fi setting I wrote for Haymaker! a while back (I don't recall offhand whether it made its way into EZ Hero or not) called Fleet of a Thousand Points. I'd originally targeted it for inclusion in TUV back when it was to be a Hero Plus project under 4th Ed, and when that book was switched to a print product it was the first thing I cut.

In F1KP (as I like to call it for short), PC is "Player Civilization." The setting was designed so each player designed an entire culture on its own planet, and they proceeded to play from there, exploring space until they encountered each other and then dealing with each other however they saw fit.

The principle could pretty easily be extended to a fantasy setting with each player controlling a kingdom, island, or other civilized land. I'd imagine that someone could rework the principles to many other types of setting as well.

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Or maybe, if I stretch the concept of "Base" a little, it would be suitable for The Ultimate Base.

You shouldn't have to stretch it that far. Under (I think) 3rd ed. Champions rules it was easy to buy a "base" that encompassed the entire planet, with points left over to subjugate the inhabitants.

More seriously, there is precedent for having nation-sized bases... Dr. Doom, ruler of Latvia, is one example. Adding some kind of measure for resources, population, economy and culture to large bases seems pretty logical to me.

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This is a fascinating concept. It's a logical extension of both the base rules and the old FH mass combat rules, which treated military "units" of multiple individuals as single characters with stats, who acted and took damage as one entity.

In conjunction with comprehensive mass combat rules, this idea could be the basis for a whole strategic game using the HERO System. Certainly worth exploring in an article for DH, or maybe even as an e-book in its own right.

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Your discussion sparked off an idea - there are several supervillains that rule countries. What about a villain who *is* a country? That would be one tough bad guy. Kind of like Ego the Living Planet but on a smaller scale.

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Stats would depend on what you're actually trying to model. How about we use the usual stats, and the things Taber suggested would be modelled through skills/perks. Wealthy for a rich nation, Well Connected for a nation that is usually the "neutral" country (think Switzerland during WW2), some kind of perk for resources, things like that. Then, the stats would represent the nation's attributes in a bit more abstracted vien. For instance, INT could represent the overall education level of the inhabitants, STR would be military force available, EGO would be the wisdom of the rulers, and BODY would be a measure of the population level, and how much damage it could take before the nation ceased to exist as a coherent whole. This way, you're still using the stats you know, and the rules (sort of) as they're already built...

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Whilst not exactly the same, the old AD&D Birthright Campaign Setting allowed PCs to be kings who ran countries and so may be worth looking at for anyone interested in this idea. (It is long out of print so will require some searching).

Masochists amongst you may also like to look at the Aria RPG. This allowed you to 'play' countries, cities and individuals over long time periods and covered the evolution of political structures, religion, economics etc. I warn you beforehand that this book is very hard reading.